I’m quoting two articles on this subject.

“The real value of using the DOM is that the XML it creates is always well formed.” (Herrington, J., “Reading and writing the XML DOM with PHP”, http://tinyurl.com/26lenm)

“With the W3C DOM, content authors can:

- Move one part of the document tree to another without destroying and re-creating the content.

- Create elements and attach them to any point in the document tree.

- Organize and manipulate new or existing tree branches in a document fragment before inserting the objects back into the tree.

The ability to move a part of the document tree without destroying and re-creating the content reduces the size of script and is more efficient.” (“About the W3C Document Object Model”, MSDN Library, http://tinyurl.com/2erczp)

So, basically, it should be easier to manipulate XML by using DOM than directly.

A question though… What’s the biggest advantage of using DOM to generate an XML response instead of simply echo-ing it to the browser?